Stop Fixing Women by Catherine Fox

Author:Catherine Fox
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NewSouth

CHAPTER 6

Promotions not panaceas ‘Mentors talk with you, sponsors talk about you.’

HEATHER FOUST-CUMMINGS,

CATALYST’S SENIOR DIRECTOR OF RESEARCH

MANY OF US KNOW WHAT it’s like. There’s a meeting to get to but the timing means a dash home straight afterwards, and that means there will be bags to carry, possibly shopping for dinner, gym gear or even that craft stuff you need for the kids’ school concert costume. The burden of fitting together the demands of paid and unpaid work at home still often sits on women’s shoulders. And so it was that a busy woman hurried to her meeting with a senior male mentor who had recently been assigned to her to help her with career advice.

She was carrying some shopping as she raced to meet her mentor and was looking forward to spending some time discussing how to better navigate the corporate world. What she didn’t expect was a ticking-off from this senior executive, who wasted little time in telling her that bringing shopping to a meeting was highly unprofessional. In his opinion. It’s a story that did the rounds of the women’s business community in Sydney when a high-profile professional body decided to launch, with much fanfare, a mentoring scheme to help more women get into senior ranks. Neither the mentors nor those being mentored had much preparation, and often enough, the senior men involved had very little idea of the problems and career concerns the women were facing.

It’s not so much a gender gap in experience as a yawning chasm. Another anecdote that circulated at the same time concerned the head of this same professional body ringing up one of Australia’s highest-profile female directors about the mentoring program. She assumed, understandably given her stature and experience, that she was being approached to act as a mentor. She was wrong: it was an invitation to be mentored, even though she had far more experience than the man inviting her. When she declined, she was told it didn’t really matter as her participation was just ‘to tick a box’.

Not all mentoring schemes for women are so flawed. There’s been a boom in demand for these programs but a surprising lack of scrutiny on how they are structured and whether they actually deliver. And the invitation list is usually exclusive: ‘high-potential’ women or a small senior group, who get to join either internal schemes matching senior executives with more junior women, or are sent off to mentoring programs run by consulting firms. But if the aim has been to get more women through the ranks, there’s not much to show for it. If anything, the progress of women into senior ranks has been as glacial as ever – or has gone backwards – in recent years. That can’t be blamed on mentoring alone, of course, but many organisations are simply not able to point to a tangible link between mentoring and better results. Perhaps it’s because these relationships end up focusing once again on fixing women and as Sheryl Sandberg suggests, are more like a form of therapy.

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